A wearable that marks collective, unacknowledged loss through visceral bodily experience — grieving what society chooses to forget.

About

Ungrievable Subjects highlights the collective loss of life incurred during the Covid-19 pandemic and how these deaths are often forgotten in a societal attempt to return to normalcy. Data and statistics collected by the CDC — while considered skewed based on reporting and collection methods — retain an archive, a testament to the tremendous level of loss of life between March 2020 and the United States' federal declaration of the end of the COVID-19 public health emergency on May 11, 2023. Over one million lives have been lost in the United States alone, and yet public grieving is nearly absent.

Grievability, according to Judith Butler, is a necessary precondition for a life to be deemed worthy of being lost. Lives considered ungrievable from the outset — due to devaluation through structural and systemic disenfranchisement — are lives rendered as unworthy of remembrance or mourning. Medical Anthropologist Martha Lincoln revisited this concept of grievability in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, examining the United States' response within the frame of necrosecurity and immunosupremacy. In this framing, illness and mortality were cast as a form of nationalist warfare, with acceptable losses debated as necessary to preserve the economy and a distinctly American way of life.

Butler writes: "Without grievability, there is no life, or, rather, there is something living that is other than life." The "something living that is other than life" is embodied by the machine's actions and enlivened by its operations. In light of this, what does it mean when the machine remembers and keeps alive what the general population would like to forget?

Process

Ungrievable Subjects is constructed with custom-built electronics and software. The object searches online through CDC statistics tallying deaths from the Covid-19 pandemic, activating a ceramic heating element encased in a custom-designed sterling silver pendant embedded in the collar. The pendant is designed to lay against the wearer's skin. The temperature of the heating element reaches 75°C — hot enough to scald flesh — marking each death through a visceral mark on the body. This is a manifestation of pain and loss, of lives that are not mourned, of lives deemed expendable in a rush to "return to normal."

Credits

Custom-built electronics by Lauria Clarke. Custom code and web programming by Julia Daser. 3D modeling, digital fabrication, and documentation by Pepi Ng.